Top 10 Reasons Obama Should Resist Military Plans for American Bases in Iraq

I present below the top 10 reasons for which President-Elect Obama should stick to his guns and withdraw US troops from Iraq despite any resistance he may get from the US officer corps and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Porter also points to George Will’s report of Gates’s views on a long-term US troop presence in Iraq:

‘ He [Gates] stresses, however, that there is bipartisan congressional support for “a long-term residual presence” of perhaps 40,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and that the president-elect’s recent statements have not precluded that. Such a presence “for decades” has, he says, followed major U.S. military operations since 1945, other than in Vietnam. And he says, “Look at how long Britain has had troops in Cyprus.” ‘

On the other hand, Odierno does not appear to share Gates’s hopes that 40,000 troops could stay in Iraq in the medium to long term, given the statement he made at Balad that I started with.

Here are the reasons for which a long-term US presence– of the sort Gates is said by Wills to have advocated– is completely impractical.

1. The Status of Forces Agreement passed by the Iraqi parliament explicitly calls for all US troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. In fact, the Iraqi cabinet and parliament and notables such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani all wanted a shorter timetable than that. This schedule is the maximum they will put up with.

2. The US military cannot stay in Iraq against the will of the elected government. Those who doubt this principle should look at what happened two decades ago in the Philippines. Or consider Uzbekistan’s withdrawal of permission for US to use its bases, in 2005. The diplomatic cost of staying against a country’s will is generally too high for Washington to take that risk. Gates can wish for a change of heart on the part of the Iraqi government, but it is highly unlikely to happen.

3. The fatwas or formal legal rulings of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani must be obeyed by all adult Shiites who follow him (the majority in Iraq). He wants US troops out. He pressured al-Maliki to bargain hard over the SOFA, and he was reportedly not happy with the infringement on Iraqi sovereignty in the final version of the SOFA. One fatwa from Sistani could put hundreds of thousands of angry Shiites in the streets protesting any remaining US bases, and there would be no way for the Iraqi government to resist such a demand that it ask the US to leave.

4. The Sadr Movement would never accept a permanent US base in Iraq. The British contingent in Basra took constant mortar and rocket fire from the Mahdi Army, until ultimately the shellshocked Iraqi neighbors of the base in downtown Basra sked the British to move out to the airport. They did so, and went on taking mortar fire out there. They are being withdrawn by June of 2009 by PM Gordon Brown.

5. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and its Badr Corps paramilitary would never accept a long-term US presence, since they want to assert control over Iraq themselves. It was touch and go whether they would accept the SOFA, which gives the US military more prerogatives and leaves them in the country longer than ISCI would like.

6. The Sunni Arab guerrillas will never accept a long-term US base. They would also find ways of hitting it, and its very presence would fuel and prolong the Sunni insurgency.

7. Iran would never put up with a long-term US base in Iraq, and would certainly supply Iraqi guerrillas with the weapons needed to hound and harass US troops.

8. Syria would not want a long-term US base, and the Syrian Baath has enough assets in Iraq to ensure that US troops would be under constant attack.

9. The international Salafi Jihadi movement (what the US tends to call al-Qaeda, but the latter is only one part of this larger movement) will be galvanized by any attempt of the US to stay in Iraq for the long term militarily, and a US base in Iraq will produce constant terrorism. The way the US came to Iraq, as an act of unprovoked aggression, left the US presence without any legitimacy, and the Salafi Jihadis will make use of that condition of Illegality to challenge any base.

10. There is no safe place for an American base. A US base near Baghdad would have to be supplied from Kuwait and southern Iraq, and those supply lines could always be cut by angry Shiites and Iran. A US base near Basra in the south would face the same constant attacks and harassment that the British suffered. A US base in Kurdistan would have to be supplied via Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. But Turkey is in conflict with the Kurds, a conflict that could become hot and result in supplies being cut off to the US base. The US military would be in an impossible situation if Turkish-Kurdistan violence broke out, since Turkey is a NATO ally but the Kurds are the only Iraqis that might want a US presence. Moreover, US backing for Baghdad and Nuri al-Maliki’s assertion of authority over Kurdish populations outside Kurdistan in Iraq proper have caused the Kurdistan leadership to rethink whether they really want an interfering US military in their area.

A long-term US base in Iraq is a crackpot Neoconservative fantasy that is highly unlikely to be realized. Like all Neocon fantasies, even if it could be realized, it would cause endless trouble and further wars.

President-elect Obama, keep your pledges and redeem the United States by seeking friendship with Iraq rather than supremacy in Iraq.